Notre Dame's Wikipedia page hands the Irish a long list of football rivalries, and if you take that list at face value, you've been had. A rivalry is a team that keeps you up at night and a game you circle in July, one that can ruin or save a season. By that test, Notre Dame has one. The rest are a mix of real history and padding, and somebody decided volume was the same thing as hatred.
Start at the top, because the top is honest. Notre Dame and USC is the only entry on that list that would survive a stranger asking "who do you actually hate?" The series began in 1926 and has been played every year since, with two exceptions: a wartime pause in 1943, 1944 and 1945, and 2020, when the Pac-12 cancelled its non-conference schedule during the pandemic. A century, minus a world war and a global shutdown. That's what a rivalry looks like.
The one game on this list that actually earns the word is also the one in limbo. Lincoln Riley has put the halt squarely on Notre Dame, saying the two schools spent months trying to find a way to keep it going. Whoever you blame, sit with the absurdity of it: a page claiming that many rivalries can't guarantee the only matchup anyone outside South Bend cares about. If you're going to put a rivalry on the shelf, make it one of the fake ones.
Below USC, there's a tier that genuinely belongs, and it's small. Army, going back to the days when a win over Notre Dame meant something coast to coast. Michigan State, who play for the Megaphone. Purdue, Pitt, Stanford, Nebraska. These are old series with real scars and real history attached. You can argue the order all day (that's the fun), but nobody's arguing whether they count.
Then you hit the bottom of the list, and the bottom is where the con lives. Notre Dame's independence means it plays a rotating cast of big-name programs plus a block of ACC scheduling-contract opponents, and apparently playing somebody roughly 20 times is enough to get typed up as a "rivalry." A home-and-home you agreed to in a conference office is just a date on a calendar. A quality opponent, a great game, sure. A long win-loss record doesn't make it a rivalry.
Tradition should outrank recent scoreboards, and a lopsided modern record shouldn't erase a storied old series. That's why Army stays on the schedule even when the games aren't close, and why USC sits at the top no matter who's won lately. A trophy you've never heard of, born from a contract game you forgot you were playing, is just inventory.
Anyone can edit that page, and the bar got set at "we've played them a lot." That's a terrible bar. It takes the single most emotional word in the sport and spreads it thin until it means nothing. Trim the list to the handful that make your stomach drop, protect the USC game above all of them, and let the other dozen be what they are: good opponents Notre Dame happens to play.
